I think ideally an AI could never play the game as well as a skilled player. That's another thing I've thought a lot about: how to stop bots from undermining the entire system. In a transparent environment where everyone can see what everyone is doing I don't think this would be very hard, and it would increase the value of being a human player by 100 fold. We have to break away from the menial pointless tasks (like farming herbs in WOW) and reward players for actual proof-of-brain. This way bots will have a very hard time keeping up with gameplay. If the game is constantly evolving the chance that a bot will be able to keep up is very low. I've even thought about utilizing fingerprint scanning on smartphones and/or facial recognition to stop botters.

I also want it to be high stakes. I always loved playing Diablo 2 on hardcore mode. Even though I played on a 56k modem and died all the time to lag like a crazy person. I think my ideal game would also involve perma death with PvP on top of that with a crypto auction house. With stakes that high bots would get shredded.

My philosophy is use AI to automate out the shit jobs that nobody wants. I think game balancing is rewarding enough that people would want to do it. No sense in trying to automate it out.